Chapter 8: Does P–12 Educational Research Ameliorate or Perpetuate inequity?

Writers of the August 2013 Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development, provided by the Institution for Educational Sciences (IES) (U.S. Department of Education, 2016) stated that educational researchers should contribute “to an evidence base that can inform and provide justification for other types of research” (p. 10), and that “at its core, scientific inquiry is the same in all fields ... a continual process of rigorous reasoning.... It builds understanding in the form of models or theories that can be tested” (p. 7). For example, such scientific reasoning has led to increasingly sophisticated understandings of the objective reality of gravity, which affects everyone and everything on Earth regardless of anyone’s subjective experience of or belief in the phenomenon. Use of the word “reasoning” in the IES quotation harkens back to Plato, who argued that entire systems of theoretical objective principles could be created in the social world. In these systems, rationality could be used to defend objective principles in order to explain human actions (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 70).¹ In this chapter, I will argue to the contrary—that such objective principles and realities cannot be applied to our social world and more specifically to research within P–12 public schools. Moreover, I contend that in pursuit of objective principles, researchers employ methods within large-scale research designs that actually impede their ability to uncover phenomena that produce or represent (and perpetuate) inequitable teaching praxes.